Plaid and Denim
by Dukes126plus
Summary: Minutes later, that’s Luke making perfect sense while blowing every fuse in Bo’s brain. Two vignettes from No More Mr. Nice Guy.
1. Plaid and Denim

_No More Mr. Nice Guy_ was a hard one the first time through, so it wound up as another drabble. Which was cheating and I knew it, so I went back and wrote a totally different vignette, found in chapter two.

This one was based on some of the cute exchanges between the boys when they are in Capitol City.

* * *

"How come you got all the questions, I got all the answers?" That's Luke, complaining.

Bo's got answers, he's just not sharing them.

Or, more accurately, he's not going to rock this boat; there's no way to do it without flipping it right over and drowning everyone.

"Enos wouldn't know me if I wasn't wearing plaid." Minutes later, that's Luke making perfect sense while blowing every fuse in Bo's brain.

Screw unstable boats. He'll remind Luke of this tonight at bedtime, plaid and denim on the floor.

"Oops," copping an _accidental_ feel. "Didn't know it was you without your shirt."


	2. Measuring Inches

The other _No More Mr. Nice Guy_ vignette. It also started with some of the cute things the boys say to each other, but ultimately focused on the stunt that has Bo jumping onto the bad guys' car.

* * *

"Give an old wet blanket there like Luke there an inch and he'd measure it."

Bo is a riotously funny guy, just chock full of brilliant observations. Must be nice to assume that every inch is the same length, but if Bo would ever bother to get out a ruler, he'd figure out that sometimes a man can get shortchanged by a fraction. Or two.

Blondie over there doesn't own a single measuring instrument; he just reckons things will fall into his lap in exactly the right amounts. And mostly they do, because before anything can even get close to landing on Bo, Luke has measured it in six different ways: making sure that it's not big enough to hurt him, heavy enough to crush him, hard enough to leave bruises on him, moving fast enough to puncture any part of him, hot enough to burn him or too close for his comfort.

But it's not Bo that really needs to be watched over this time, it's Daisy and her Captitol-City-Department-Store-one-millionth-customer-blah-blah-blah. She's cut from the same cloth as Bo, except she's female and that leaves her even less logical and more vulnerable. And purring like a kitten with a belly full of its mama's milk, there in the back seat of the General. Fully expecting that at the end of this trip she'll wind up with fabulous prizes instead of—

"What do you say now, Mr. Gloom?" is Bo, after him again. Because now that they're standing in front of the store in question, Daisy's got diamonds, plane tickets, a fur coat and a little yellow car with a ridiculous oversized bow on top. The only thing missing is a giant neon sign saying _Gullible_, or maybe _Suckers _or something that would take a little bit of thinking, like _Beware the_ _Wolf in Sheep's Clothing_.

It's not like Luke relishes being right. Life would be better if telegrams from absolute strangers really meant gifts from the heavens. And if Bo could be counted on to change the General's oil once every couple of months, and Jesse turned out to secretly be Santa Claus. Sadly, ain't none of those things likely to be the truth any time soon.

But there are shiny things right there in front of the whole lot of them, and Bo and Daisy are enamored. Even Jesse, who isn't supposed to have a materialistic bone in his body, has grown a touch giddy. And the whole bunch of them think they don't need Luke, piling into that silly little yellow car that's supposedly Daisy's now, and leaving him alone in the General.

Interesting – in a totally predictable kind of a way – how grateful they all become for his presence when they hit a spitting and sputtering roadblock, in the form of one Rosco P. Coltrane. Just check out that look Jesse gives him, all sly and out of the corner of his eye. _You know what to do, Luke. Save the day for us._

He might be tempted to say something along the lines of _sure, I'll get right on that, soon as I'm done measuring this here inch. __Which seems to really only be about half an inch. Shame no one bothered to take a good look at it until y'all found yourselves cuffed to a stolen car…_

But he doesn't, he grabs Bo and moves forward with fixing things his trusting family allows to get broken. He doesn't exactly get pleasure out of running back and forth between Hazzard and Capitol City, trying to save Daisy and Jesse from the trap the Dukes wind up falling into, despite his warnings. Doesn't enjoy running from the law or how the General dies on the railroad tracks in the path of an oncoming train. If it happens to be fun to trick Rosco into embedding his car in a silo, or maybe to smack Boss Hogg over the head a couple of times, well those just happen to be lucky little bonuses in an otherwise consistently torturous ordeal. They certainly don't justify the way he's been inconvenienced. Including having to pull Boss Hogg's fat out of the fire, even if it's the only right thing to do.

Bo can call him a wet blanket all he wants, but the fact of it is, Luke's right. Unlike the rest of his family (and his whole county, when it comes right down to it), he's the one who looks at all the angles and sees where the catch is. Like how, now that the crooked crooks done double-crossed Boss Hogg, they've probably got no plans on letting him live. Enos is a sheriff's deputy, ought to have learned the workings of the criminal mind somewhere along the line. Shoot, he even did that gig in Los Angeles and didn't come back dead, so he should have learned _something_.

But he didn't, because he doesn't want to know bad things can happen, any more than Bo or Daisy does. He just reckons that if he smiles a lot and laughs his pre-pubescent giggle, all the world will smile back on him.

It's Luke that's got to do all the watching out, measuring, and just plain knowing what's going to happen next for the rest of Hazzard's trusting souls. Like how he's narrowed down that this chase is going to come down to some external acrobatics; someone's got to go out of the window of the moving General. And truth be told, he trusts himself to keep Bo safe out there more than he has faith in things working out if the roles are reversed. Which is why he pulls a couple of quick seat changes with Bo to assure that he'll be behind the wheel when the time comes for heroics (and Bo seems to have him figured out on that one, actually). Still he's got it all measured out so Bo's risk of injury is really pretty minimal.

It's not a ton of fun being the one who knows that Boss and Rosco will go right back to their childish, corruptive ways, or even foreseeing that Daisy will beat Jesse at checkers.

He knows everything before it happens, like how Bo's going to slack out of evening chores, then convince Luke to go to the Boar's Nest where he can brag about his exploits to the little ladies. Right about the time he's got three or four drooling, Luke knows he's about to ask whether it's okay if he takes the General. Luke won't mind catching a ride home with Daisy, right?

"Luke," he says. "Would you mind if we went home now?"

He's about to wave Bo off when the words twist themselves through the folds of his brain until he understands Bo's request. "Yeah, okay," he agrees, making a mental note to shove a thermometer into Bo's mouth the second they cross the threshold into the farmhouse.

But they don't get that far before Bo's got another little surprise for him.

"It's kind of a rush, ain't it, Luke?"

"What is?" Walking away from the girls, the wind throbbing through the General's open windows, heading home before midnight?

"Being the one who does the jumping from the outside of the car. I mean it's scary, but then there's that moment when you're just flying and just hoping nothing goes wrong," Bo answers, grinning like Christmas morning.

Yeah, Bo would see it that way, would have no idea that Luke was measuring the distance between the General's bumper and the bad guy's trunk, and then there was the distance between Bo and the dirt.

"It was—I want to do it again, Luke." Clearly, however, Luke has mismeasured exactly how much alcohol Bo's ingested tonight.

"Bo." He's got to stop this runaway train. "There ain't no reason to go climbing around the outside of the car now." For starts, there's no bad guy's car out there to jump onto.

"All right," Bo agrees, and instead of climbing out of the window he climbs into Luke's lap. Or does the best he can, what with the console there between them.

"Bo, what in Sam Hill do you think you're—" His foot's on the brake, reflexive reaction. "You're drunk," he announces.

"No I ain't," Bo argues. Luke's not convinced, but—"I only had two. I just reckon I learned something today." By now the car's at a full stop; between them, somehow, the boys have stashed it in some scrub.

Luke opens his mouth to request exactly what kind of a brilliant epiphany that blonde brain has had, but he never makes it all the way to words. At least not before Bo's tongue is shoving itself up against his, stilling the vibration.

He's humored Bo through just about every other whim he's ever had, from stealing Rosco's slot machines to running off to Hollywood to be in a movie, but this here is—getting better, actually, now that Bo's not trying to gag him anymore. In fact, by the time Bo's done licking his tonsils, Luke figures out that maybe his tonsils needed a good licking after all. And that there is the one inch that Luke's never thought to measure before.

Makes him wonder why.


End file.
